High on the New York Times’s list of most emailed stories is a feature on Sriracha sauce, the rooster-labeled, green-topped, hot, sweet and transcendent condiment that, in my book, signifies good things to come when I see it on a restaurant table or in a friend’s kitchen. The sauce - which I always thought was Vietnamese - is an interesting mongrel: it’s the creation of an ethnically-Chinese refugee from Vietnam, invented in Los Angeles as a pan-Asian chili sauce. And I’m far from the only devotee - the article quotes from top chefs who swear by the stuff and from drunken customers calling the factory to sing its praises.

I try to take a week off from work before Christmas and grab some leisure time in the kitchen, cooking for the holidays and to make gifts for friends and family. One of my favorite creations this year was a batch of Sriracha-laced salt caramels. As a diabetic, I can’t really eat candy, so was looking to make a candy that was satisfying enought to my tastes that I could eat a tiny piece and be happy for hours. These didn’t turn out nearly as strong as I’d intended, but my candy-eating friends and family tell me that they’re quite addictive.

Ingredients:
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 4 tablespoons (half a stick) of butter
- 2-3 tablespoons of Sriracha chili sauce
- teaspoon of salt, preferably sea salt

Mix those four ingredients in a saucepan, bring to a boil, remove from heat and cover.

- 1 1/2 cups white sugar (not confectioner’s sugar, which has corn starch in it)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup of water

Mix these ingredients in a pan that you’re willing to damage. (If you’re careful, you won’t, but candy is tricky business.) Heat over medium heat, stirring like a madman. You’re trying to dissolve all the sugar into a heavy syrup. Once you’ve got that syrup and it’s boiling, stop stirring and start swirling the pan instead. (Once you’re boiling sugar, it’s very easy to cause the solution to crystalize into a hard, unusable mess - one of the easiest ways to screw this up is to introduce sugar crystals from a dirty spoon. If you do crystalize, add water to the sugar and start again by disolving into a syrup…)

Using a candy thermometer, raise the temperature to the “firm ball” stage, around 245-250F. Pour in the cream mixture and stir hard to combine ingredients. Heat, stirring, until temperature is back at 245-250F. Pour the mixture out onto a baking sheet lined with wax paper or parchement. Let cool for about an hour, then cut caramel into small squares or rectangles. Wrap caramels in wax paper - they keep for months.

And no, Sriracha-flavored caramels aren’t an authentic manifestation of Vietnamese or Thai culture… but then again, neither is Sriracha sauce. To hell with authenticity - eat what tastes good.

The New York City suburbs make me nervous and itchy. I grew up in northern Westchester county, far enough north that we lived on a dirt road near active farms, but near enough to the that my father could commute every day for more than twenty years. As the area morphed from exurb to suburb, I left, my sister left, and eventually my parents left, all moving north to western Massachusetts.

This weekend, I drove down to Danbury, CT for my twentieth high school reunion and found that there’s a distinct dividing line separating suburb from “upstate” New York. I believe it runs through The Red Rooster, a drive-in burger shack in Brewster, NY. South of the line, people honk, cut me off in traffic and generally make me feel like a hayseed. North, things are slower, more polite… and decidedly weirder.

“Quaint” is the word that comes to most people’s minds when they think of New England - white clapboard buildings with green shutters, old barns, sap buckets on maple trees. We’ve got all that out in western New England and eastern New York… but we also have spooky abandoned mills, labyrinths, witches, unexpected sculpture gardens, and in the backyard of a neighbor in Williamstown, a twelve-foot tall straight-backed chair, painted blue, for no discernible reason. So yeah, we got quaint, but we got weird, too.

One of dozens of abandoned buildings at the Harlem Valley complex

About fifteen miles north of that imaginary line is an amazing complex, called “Dover Knolls” by the optimistic and “Harlem Valley Wingdale” by virtually everyone else. Lining both sides of Route 22, a busy north/south road, are dozens of stately brick buildings, some of them quite massive. Set slightly off the road is a disused baseball field and grandstand, and farther up the hill, there’s the unmistakeable glint of coiled barbed wire. The roads into the facility are open to the public, and far from abandoned, but the buildings are locked tight, sometimes boarded shut and emblazoned with No Trespassing signs. It is, in other word, exactly the sort of place I enjoy researching, exploring and photographing.

In 1911, the State of New York began building a massive prison in Wingdale, NY on a patch of rich farmland. Plans included more than twenty buildings surrounded by a massive wall, and building costs were projected at more than $4 million dollars. The goal of the facility was to alleviate overcrowding at Sing Sing prison with a prison farm, where trusted inmates could harvest hay and tend cattle. For reasons that are obscure (and which I’m now trying to research), plans to build the prison were shelved in 1912, and construction slowed, completing only four of the originally planned structures.

A postcard of the Harlem Valley State Hospital, from asylumprojects.org. I have to believe that this is a photo of a plan or scale model - I think the layout of the facility ended up being much smaller than this, and a photo from this perspective would have need to be an aerial view. But I’m just speculating here…

Governor Alfred Smith rescued the site in 1923, with plans for “a hospital for the agrarian insane” which could house “high-grade, harmless lunatics who are physically rugged” and who could help work the farms associated with the facility. In 1924, Harlem Valley State Hospital began its seventy year life as an institution for the mentally ill. At its peak, nearly six thousand patients were committed to the institution, and a staff of more than five thousand worked at the facility, which became a centerpiece of the local economy. The hospital pioneered insulin shock therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, group therapy, and ultimately the development which brought about the downfall of the facility: the widespread use of psychoactive medications to help manage mental illness.

By the 1970s, the deinstitutionalization movement was shrinking the staff at the hospital, and in 1994, it closed its doors for good. What remains is a massive campus that functioned much as its own self-sufficient town. Exploring the campus yesterday, I found a “Short Stop” convenience store tucked between two residential buildings, floors covered with fifteen years of dust, but the signage still fresh. Accounts of the facility in its prime talk of an ice cream parlor, a bowling alley and a church, all intended for patients but open for the use of staff and townspeople as well.

The integration of a facility like this into the surrounding community leads to some weird juxtapositions. As I peered into the disused dormitories, families leaving the still-operating church drove past on their way home. Next to a boarded up, dilapidated gothic mansion (staff housing? a group home?) are small, comfortable homes with pickup trucks parked outside. Another housing development sits cheek by jowl to a quartet of razor-wire surrounded buildings, buildings that had been converted into a juvenile detention facility.

In 2004, a real estate developer bought the property - 80 buildings on 850 acres - for the fire-sale price of $3.95 million. The dream is to build a complex of condos, retirement housing, shopping and a luxury golf course, all served by a major highway and, critically, a train station with direct service to New York City, making the housing attractive for commuters hoping to balance rural life with careers in the city. But the buildings may not be such a bargain - they’re filled with lead paint and asbestos, and renovations will cost many millions, money that might be hard to raise in this down market.

In the meantime, the hospital is strange, spooky reminder of times past… and a great site for urban exploration. The folks behind Explorer Productions got some excellent photos, including beautiful interior shots featuring everyone’s favorite shade of paint, institution green. Ryan Frazier had less luck - his visit ended in his arrest by a Dover, NY deputy and a subsequent court hearing. (No one ever said this was an easy - or wise - hobby.)

Every time I drive by those massive, empty brick buildings, I think about seventy years of stories from inside those walls. And I think about the invisible line. Twenty miles further south, and the economic forces that keep these buildings empty would be unstoppable - they’d have become condos years ago, or been razed to make room for machine-extruded McMansions.

Here’s hoping someone finds a way to bring those buildings back to life without losing all that’s strange and wonderful about them.

This past weekend, I wrote a quick tool that estimates the incidence of certain words within the twitter stream using just a single search, not polling for weeks of data as some of my other tools do. This makes it pretty easy to look at a term like “flu” several times a day, discovering that flu-centric tweets have represented between 1.5% and 3% of all tweets for the past couple of days.

Twitter just overhauled its web interface, and added an interesting feature - terms that are trending. This information has been available in third-party tools for some time, but now it’s only one click to see what people are saying about #therescue.

I ran a set of these trending topics through my tool and got a pretty wide attention distribution:
1.918 % Swine Flu
0.241 % #swineflu
0.233 % H1N1
0.297 % Wolverine
0.152 % #therescue
0.097 % Mother’s Day
0.192 % Mexico
0.233 % Chrysler
0.043 % #wordkill
0.060 % Inbetweeners
(Percentage is an estimate of what percent of all recent tweets contained this term. It’s extrapolated by retrieving 100 instances of the term via Twitter’s search and calculating how many tweets transpired between mention 1 and mention 100.)

Makes sense. Showing the ten most popular terms on Twitter would likely be extremely boring - my guess is that “lunch”, “dinner” and “sleep” would dominate. (It’s evening here on the east coast of the US, and “dinner” is currently appearing in roughly 0.6% of tweets.) Much more interesting to show terms or tags that are higher now than they were an hour or a week ago… It’s interesting, though - do we read a list like this as a list of most popular topics, even if we know that there’s two orders of magnitude more interest in Swine Flu than in The Inbetweeners?

And then, of course, there’s the potential for using these terms to gain attention. Like this wonderful tweet from Beau Wade, demonstrating that the author clearly has his/her finger on the pulse of the planet. Or a particular subcommunity of wealthy, wired, worried people on that planet.

Tim Hwang is a researcher at the Berkman Center who works closely with Yochai Benkler on his research on cooperation. But he may be best known for his role in organizing ROFLCon, which David Weinberger describes as “the first gathering of internet memesters”. Tim’s work is important, Weinberger posits, because he focuses on “people who don’t often make it to Berkman, i.e., most of the internet.”

Tim describes himself as “a long-time listener, first-time caller,” and introduces his talk, “The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto”, with an apology for the obscure pun. (It’s a reference to Eric Raymond’s legendary essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.) Tim’s interested in the propogation of memes on the internet, and is taking early steps towards a model for studying how these ideas spread. (In a terrifying turn, Tim promises us that he’s working on a documentary about Goatse, hoping to interview the model in the infamous images, as well as internet experts regarding the importance of the phenomenon.)

2008 was a year when internet culture and mainstream culture became profoundly entangled, Tim argues. Several successful books were published based on internet memes, including “Stuff White People Like“, which Tim reports is now in its 15th printing. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade featured a float for the TV show, “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” - midway through a song, Rick Astley appeared on the float, singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”. In other words, the Macy’s parade included a rickroll, bringing an Internet meme to an audience of tens of millions.

To understand the spread of these memes, Tim uses a model offered by Benkler - he understands the internet as a physical system, which supports a system built of code, which in turn supports a set of content. This suggests that these memes - a specialized form of content - have a relationship to the hardware and code of the internet, not just to each other, or to past internet memes.

This analysis leads him to posit “the 4chan paradox” - why is 4chan such a fertile birthplace for internet memes? Facebook has a larger number of users and a wealth of tools to allow memes to spread - status updates, chats, abilities to “friend” other users. Given this wealth of tools (Tim describes Facebook as the “stealth bomber” of social networking, given the arsenal of tools at its disposal), we’d expect to see more memes like “25 Things About Me” flourish, and cross from the internet world into mainstream consciousness.

4chan is no one’s stealth bomber or swiss army knife. It’s a brutally simple site - post an image, and people respond with their own images and text. The community encourages anonymity, and there’s not even a profile system to make it easy to see a user’s contributions. In other words, “Facebook should p0wn 4chan in terms of memes created.” Despite the apparent “poverty” of these tools, 4chan has been an extremely fertile environment for memes - Tim traces LOLCats, Rickrolling and the various parodies of “Chocolate Rain” to the 4chan boards.

Tim offers a useful distinction between memes that spread on Facebook and on 4chan. Memes on Facebook are constant - your Wall may be decorated with a piece of ASCII art and a message that “you’ve been hit by the beautiful truck”… but while this message spreads across Facebook, it hasn’t spawned the beautiful motorcycle or the ugly speedboat. 4chan iterates memes - the appearance of ceiling cat leads to the birth of basement cat, and eventually to the LOLCat bible, where LOLCat afficionados are translating the text of the Bible into LOLspeak.

Ceiling Cat creats teh universes and stuffs

LOLCats has expanded to include a programming language, LOLCode and a political movement, LOLBama, which wants us all to know “Yes We Can Has“. 4chan memes spawn communities, like that around the LOLCat Bible or I Can Has Cheezburger.

Tim believes that Jonathan Zittrain’s idea of generativity can help explain the comparative fertility of 4chan in generating internet memes. In his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It“, Zittrain addresses the comparative success of the PC to dedicated wordprocessing machines, or the victory of the open internet to “walled garden” services like AOL. He argues that technology that’s open to third parties allows to an explosion of innovation which increases the value of the core platform.

Tim speculates that generativity applies in social systems as well. Facebook’s uses are defined and unchangeable - your status update is for telling people what you’re doing, your favorite books go here, your collection of virtual flowers is here. There are multiple mechanisms, and they’re non-trivial to master. (She just threw a sheep at me. Now what do I do?) And because Facebook allows communication within groups of friends, but constrains communication to all users, memes become silo’d - they spread through one set of friends, but perhaps not through another. 4chan has no silos, and no defined uses - it’s fertile ground for creating new uses as a result.

Over the next year, Tim predicts that “internet culture is going to do really well because the economy sucks.” He suggests that with lots of people out of work, we’ve got a high supply of potential attention, the critical commodity necessary to create internet memes. Since the collapse of the US stock market, Tim sees increased activity on sites like Twitter, and wonders whether we can see a correlation between more free time and participation. (He wisely notes that correlation is not causation and that there are lots of explanations for this trend. While I think the relationship between site growth and economic collapse is far from causal, I do think there’s an argument that bad economies can lead to increased creativity. See my recent post on economics and maker culture in Argentina.)

What’s next? Tim suggests that we start thinking of the social web as an ecosystem and proposes an early environmental movement. This might involve basic environmental advisories, warning people that certain aspects of their behavior are likely to cause damage to the environment - “If you followback everyone who follows you on Twitter, you will likely make Twitter unusuable.” Other warnings might attempt to document known bugs, like the fact that the “user-generated” Digg site has 60-70% of front page material contributed by 100 users. He suggests we might need “an EPA for the social web” which would “research and distribute information on the health of the environment of the social web.”

As so often happens, David Weinberger has even better notes on the talk, including questions and answers from the audience.

I’ll briefly expand on my question/observation to Tim. I agree that the social web needs to be thought of as an ecosystem, but I’m not sure that environmentalism is a useful paradigm as of yet. The main reason - when we study the natural environment, we’re usually interested in systems that have strong homeostasis effects - we worry when systems are out of balance and take steps to correct them, removing the mercury from the water or trying to prevent CO2 levels from rising.

There’s no homeostasis on the web yet - we don’t know what a stable, creative web looks like yet, which makes it very hard for us to offer warnings or suggestions, even obvious ones, like “Don’t follow everyone on Twitter”. (If you do, you’ll need to use special tools to manage your feeds, and they might actually make you a happier Twitterer…) Until we understand how a creative social web really works, we don’t know what to protect and what to prevent. This makes Tim’s project even more important, but it might suggest that the EPA metaphor isn’t the right next step.

In early March, we all go a little crazy here in western Massachusetts. It’s been snowing since November, and there’s no guarantee that it will stop until May. In March, local stores start advertising “cabin fever” sales. Local families attempt to sell themselves on eBay. We’re all looking for an excuse to get out of the house, and more or less anything will do.

Looking back through some old photos this evening, I realize that March is my best month for photography. I seem to react to cabin fever by engaging in my favorite hobby: milling.

Milling is a variant on a phenomenon some call “urban exploration“. We don’t have too many urbs around here, but we have a wealth of beautiful abandoned mills. Milling involves finding ways into these mills and photographing them. This, in turn, involves driving around looking for promising looking mills, scouting them out and returning with milling gear (steel-toed boots, good flashlights, reflectors to bounce light, cameras, tripods…)

So I was scouting yesterday afternoon when I came across an utterly beautiful collapsing mill in the south side of Troy, NY. I started following back roads to get closer to the buildings, and was stunned to discover that I was able to drive up to some of these hulking wrecks, climb out and start shooting photos - generally, milling requires you to park a truck and hike into sites, climbing fences, crossing railroad tracks, wading streams. I shot photos with my phone until my battery ran out and drove out… straight into the parking lot of the Rensselaer county jail.

Looking for an access road that didn’t take me past a couple dozen of Troy’s finest, I discovered that the site I’d been exploring was blurred out on Google Maps. I’d read about sensitive sites - like the Vice President’s house or Dutch military bases - blurred out on Google Maps. I’d read enough on the issue to know that this probably wasn’t Google’s fault - some government authority had approached a satellite imagery provider and demanded that a feature be obscured. And I quickly discovered that the same site was unblurred on Yahoo Maps, though not available at the level of resolution that most of Troy is on Google Maps.

Still - this was the first time I’d found myself at a location in the real world that was invisible to Google Maps. Why would someone so carefully obscure this area, leaving the jail’s basketball courts visible a few hundred meters away? And if it was so important to obscure it, why was it so easy to get into?

The ease of entry is pretty easy to explain. Based on the site is an electronics recycling company called eLot. The eLot folks are in the business of disposing of old computer hardware, televisions, comact fluorescent light bulbs, and the other detritus of our digital age. While they probably don’t get a whole lot of walk-in business, they do maintain a store, where you can pick up desktop computers for $59, or old Cisco switches. While they’re not open on Sundays, the site is open so that trucks full of dead televisions can be offloaded.

So why’s a publicly accessible site blurred out on maps?

Here’s my guess, based on a little 19th century history, and a bit more recent history. The site I was exploring (and intend to explore again, just as soon as I can find a better way in) is part of the Burden Ironworks. Built by Scottish inventor Henry Burden, the Ironworks harnessed the flow of the Wynantskill creek towards the Hudson river to power an automated horseshoe making machine. The machine was a wonder of the industrial age, and featured the largest vertical water wheel in the world, a 250 ton beast that produced 300 horsepower.

The Burden Ironworks converted from water power to gas in the late 19th century, and the wheel was abandoned in 1890, collapsing about twenty years later. From what I can tell from old maps, the northern part of the Burden complex has evidently been razed and replaced with the Rensselaer county jail - the southern part, which features the gas boilers, is still partially standing, and is the facility I began exploring. I’m looking forward to visiting the Burden Ironworks museum, which stands in the facility’s former office building, at some point soon - as it’s open by appointment only, that might require a bit of planning.

There’s a move to renovate some of these historic industrial structures. At least, there was. The Rensselaer Iron Works, just up the river from the Burden Ironworks, was purchased from its owners by the city of Troy, and New York governor David Patterson had announced plans in April 2008 for the building - post-renovation - to become the hub of an ecological monitoring center to track pollution across 315 miles of the Hudson. Less than two months later, the buildings were burned to the ground in a case of probable arson.

The gorgeous Lost Landmarks of Upstate New York website features a photo tour of the ruined buildings before the fire, noting that one of the mill buildings had been damaged by an earlier arson, and that the remaining structures were filled with abandoned cars and boats. While I can construct a narrative of someone in the Troy underworld realizing that a corpse hidden in an abandoned Edsel was going to be discovered in the renovation… but it’s as likely that someone decided to burn the building down because they were bored.

My guess for why the Burden site is blurred out - to help prevent future arson. That seems crazy to me, but I don’t have a more plausible explanation. I know that I use Google Maps to plan my routes into mills, and for all I know, arsonists do the same. Given that accessing the site involves little more than parking behind Marty Burke’s South Side Tavern and strolling in, this seems like overkill, but I’ve got no better explanation. If urban explorers, millers or Troy historians have a better explanation, I’d love your input on the comments thread.

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to Яolcats, a site that promises “English Translations of Eastern Bloc Lolcats”. One of my astute readers pointed out that, while the “translations” are hilarious, they bear no resemblance to the actual Russian text. For example:

actually translates as “If you’ve invited a girl to dance and she has agreed…don’t be too happy. You will still have to dance first.”

translates as “Age changes the style of a man; As the years go by, it gets harder to purr…and wrinkles - traces of the smiles of bye gone days - crease your face.”

I linked to the Яolcats site because I was fascinated that the Lolcats meme had crossed language barriers. About a year ago, I asked the Global Voices community whether Lolcats had hit their home communities and received a baffled shrug in response - funny pictures were being passed around, but no cute cat photos bearing funny captions. (A pair of GV’ers briefly ran LolQats, a site dedicated to images of people chewing Qat, enhanced with funny captions. These are the sort of jokes you make when Bahranis, Brazilians and Beninois end up sharing a house in Miami during new media conferences. Tragically, the image links on the site no longer seem to work. Here are some representative examples on another site, proving that all great ideas have multiple authors.)

So I was excited to see Russian speakers adding captions to cute photos of cats. I thought it was bizarre that Soviet-era kitsch should be the subject of the humor, but I didn’t bother to type captions into Google and get real translations… or read the comment threads, which include roughly a third of folks saying “That’s not a very good translation” and another third laughing at the folks who think the translations are real. So what’s wonderful is to discover both that a) Russian speakers are creating sweet, sappy, sentimental lolcats and truly snarky English speakers are creating meta-lolcats using said sappy lolcats and a heavy dose of cold-war nostalgia.

Ah, recursive humor. There’s a reason why my computer science professors wanted me to learn Lisp before setting me loose on teh Internetz.

I’m glad I went to Davos, some years back. I went twice, back in the days when I was running Geekcorps and Davos seemed like a great opportunity to meet wealthy and powerful people and raise money for my project. The raising money part never actually worked, but it was certainly good fun to see what sorts of conversations do and don’t take place in a venue like the World Economic Forum.

I stopped going because it’s expensive, even when you’re representing a charity and don’t pay the admission fee. Travel to Davos costs a great deal, and the hotels are so expensive that I ended up staying in a spare room in a hospital the second year I attended. (Yes, they were renting rooms… though getting injured and seeking a hospital room might also work if you’re truly desperate.) And while there’s an undeniable thrill to rubbing elbows with the rich, famous and powerful, the talks weren’t nearly as good as those at TED or Pop!Tech and I never had any luck raising money in the Davos setting. Good fun, but not good for my NGO, so ultimately not worth my time.

But thanks to my friend Loïc Le Meur, I’ve had the chance to have a virtual Davos experience this year. I met Loïc years ago at Davos and we’ve stayed in touch since, which has let me watch him launch the Paris Les Webs conference and videoblogging startup Seesmic. I’m always amazed at his relentless creativity in getting people to play with the tools he’s building. And today he snagged Kofi Annan… and me.

Loïc convinced the former Secretary General of the UN to give him a fifteen minute interview on camera late today at Davos, and then solicited questions for Annan via Seesmic. Below are my two questions for Secretary General Annan and his responses.

The summary, for those not interested in the video conversation: I asked what citizens in wealthy countries should do to support UN efforts in eastern DRC, western Sudan and, perhaps in the future, Somalia. I also asked what lessons the continent could take from Ghana’s elections and how those lessons could be applied in other contexts. His responses? The UN security council needs to stop issuing mandates without resources to carry them out. More than more troops on the ground, the peacekeeping forces need resources to increase mobility - 4×4s and helicopters, primarily, and citizens need to pressure their leaders to provide the resources. Regarding the election, we need to study what worked in Ghana and try to adopt techniques and lessons for other African democracies.

Okay, so it wasn’t quite as exciting as asking Annan these questions face to face, but it beats flying to Zurich. Thanks for the opportunity, Loïc, and Mr. Secretary General. And thank you, internet - the world really does get a little stranger every day.

It’s the attack of the internet memes! I’ve been tagged by two good friends, so I’ll take a few moments on a cold, dark January day to answer questions you may not actually want answers to…

Joi Ito recently tagged me with a blog meme with the following rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So… seven things you may not know:

1. I used to be a pretty competent musician. I spent much of my time in college playing hand drums as part of the college’s African music ensemble. My first trip to Africa in 1993 was on a scholarship to study Ghanaian music. While I’ve still got two xylophones and half a dozen drums in my house, I rarely play these days, mostly because I remember how if felt to be a competent drummer and I’m usually disappointed by how I play these days.

2. I’m a good cook, and my kitchen is generally filled with cooking experiments, some of them more successful than others. My latest experiment is a homemade mustard that features a heavy dose of Otter Creek Stovepipe Porter - it’s very yummy.

3. While I write a lot about journalism, I haven’t worked in a newsroom since I was sixteen years old, writing for the sports page of the Lewisboro (NY) Ledger, a weekly. The story I remember best was a feature on a game of donkey basketball that took place at the local high school.

4. I was a dreadful athelete in high school. Unfortunately, the school I attended made sports mandatory, and I spent a lot of my teenage years running on the school’s cross country team. I was so bad that I recall my parents celebrating a race in which I didn’t finish last, perhaps the only one of my career.

5. I ran a freelance graphic design business in college, accepting work from professors to lay out their books for publication and from college organizations. I probably learned more about the Internet by looking for pirated graphic design software, fonts and clipart online in the early 1990s than from any other aspect of my education.

6. I love accordians, though I don’t play as well as I’d like. There are two accordians and a concertina in my living room, and I firmly believe there is very little music that couldn’t be improved by adding an accordian line to it.

7. I collect bad movies, and have a special fondness for terrible musicals. Gems of my collection include “Big Meat Eater“, Psychos in Love, and Tongan Ninja. Recently I acquired the late Brandon Lee’s “Laser Mission“, which is rapidly becoming a favorite.

All right, and now to spread the joy. I hereby tag Lokman Tsui, Daudi Were, Mike Stopforth, Georgia Popplewell, Amira Al-Hussaini, ThaRum Bun and Rachel Barenblat.

And now, to write the post I was tagged about weeks earlier…

I don’t know when The Onion stopped being a must-read website for me. Probably sometime around the time Jon Stewart became must-see TV. Or approximately when the daily news became so depressing that Onion-style absurdity didn’t seem so funny any more. You know, ’round about the time the US invaded Iraq for no especially good reason.

This remarkable Onion story from 1/17/2001 is worth reading both as a reminder of how good The Onion can be (could be?) at times, and how prescient. Titled “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’”, it’s very hard to believe this wasn’t written last week.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”

On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.

One mention of a housing bubble or collateralized debt obligations and I would have accused The Onion of having a time machine.

Looking for insights on the future - and perhaps a few investing tips - I turned to the Onion again in an inauguration week. Alas, while the Onion’s roduction values have gotten much better, the content… well.. here’s “Congress Debates Adding Elaborate Dance To Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony”.

Say what you will about the decor in the Lloyd Hotel - and I have - the food’s pretty damned good. And the menu’s pretty charming, offering options like “boiled vegetables”, “posh boiled vegetables” or “superposh boiled vegetables”.

I did get hung up in the “deep fried” section, however. There, below the cheese croquettes and the bitterballs (fried gravy, more or less): “balls of chef thor, three”.

Genevieve: He’s got three of them?
Me: Had. Who knows how many are left.
Genevieve: Please tell me we’re ordering that.
…
Me, to the waiter: The balls of Chef Thor, please.
Waiter: Of course. (pauses). That doesn’t sound very good does it?
Me: How do you say it in Dutch?
Waiter: Chef Thors Ballen
Genevieve: I don’t think that’s really any better.